Beginning in 2011 the academic programs of the Marilyn I. Walker School have celebrated the legacy of Marilyn, her gift and her vision by programming the Walker Cultural Leaders (WCL) Series. The ongoing development and refinement of the WCL program facilitates invitations to recognized cultural leaders, top researchers, visiting artists, scholars, professionals, theatre companies, producing and presenting organizations, associations, and others to contribute to the intellectual and creative life of the School and the Niagara region.

Our guests will engage in professional activities such as public lectures, performances, exhibitions, workshops, laboratories, and demonstrations, and will participate in other pedagogical and creative activities including guest teaching, the professional mentoring of faculty and staff, critiques of student work, and community engagement activities.

In addition to generally intensifying the creative, scholarly and teaching cultures of the School, special emphasis is put on developing knowledge and familiarity of the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts as an incubator in the arts and culture sector of Niagara, exploring potential intersections of the School and the surrounding community/region, and promoting inter‐ and trans‐disciplinarity within the School and beyond.

Walker Cultural Leader Program for 2017-18:

Walker Cultural Leader Series and Canada 150 presents:

Colonial Print Culture and the Limits of Enslaved Resistance: Examining the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Fugitive Slave Archive in Canada and Jamaica

A public lecture, reception and book signing by Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson.

Dr. Charmaine A. Nelson is a Professor of Art History at McGill University. Her current research project juxtaposes fugitive slave advertisements, portraiture, and genre studies from Nova Scotia, Quebec, and Jamaica, to examine differences in the visual dimensions of creolization between slave minority and slave majority sites of the British Atlantic world. In 2016, she was named as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. Most recently, Nelson has been appointed the William Lyon Mackenzie King Visiting Professor of Canadian Studies at Harvard University for the 2017 – 2018 academic year. Dr. Nelson will present her research in a public lecture as a part of Visual Arts’ Walker Cultural Leader Series programming.

Note: The lecture will be followed by a reception and book signing at the MIWSFPA, 15 Artists’ Common.
This is a free community event, but tickets are required. The event is ‘sold-out’. Place your name on a waiting list at wclnelson.eventbrite.com

About the artist:
A visual artist working in Vienna, Austria, Bernhard Cella is the founder of Salon für Kunstbuch, installed in the 21. Haus / Belvedere, and of the no-isbn project. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at the University of Fine Art Hamburg. A book maker, Cella published an expanded edition of his No ISBN. On Self-Publishing in 2017.

The book as printed space – concept and printed work; Medium/Media: All media that can be captured on paper. A book making workshop with Bernhard Cella.

The objective of this workshop is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the medium “book” as a production process, and for individual participants to produce their own small publication or part of a larger one. This workshop focuses on the current status of the printed (analogue) book and associated questions. Participants will design and develop their own publications, from the initial idea through to the finished product.

The Walker Quartet

In its second season, the Department of Music’s resident Walker String Quartet will partner with faculty pianist Karin Di Bella in a program that features two of the most iconic works in the string quintet repertoire. The Schumann quintet was written in 1842 and created the genre. Almost 100 years later, Shostakovich redefined it.

Memories Known and Unknown

Visual Arts faculty have selected photographs and ephemera from the Bell-Sloman Collection of the James Gibson Library, part of a remarkable collection donated to Brock University by Rick Bell in 2010. The collection features more than 300 photos and various papers spanning more than a century that document the Bell and Sloman families, who descended from former slaves in the American south. The exhibition at the Visual Arts gallery will showcase some of the material presented at the Walker Cultural Leader series lecture on January 31, when we are pleased to welcome Dr. Julie Crooks from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her research situates the Bell-Sloman Collection as a “fugitive archive,’ built with defiance and resistance, in order to preserve, salvage and recover the histories of African Canadian communities whose stories and material artefacts are often left untold or subject to erasure.

Exhibition: Monday, January 9, 2018 to Friday, February 9, 2018
Viewing times of the exhibition: brocku.ca/miwsfpa/visual-artsLocation of Exhibition: Visa Exhibition Space, Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts, Brock University

Note: The date of the exhibition reception is Wednesday, January 31 at 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. The lecture follows at 7:00 p.m.
A free community event. Please see below for more details.

Walker Cultural Leader Series and Canada 150 Public Lecture:

The Bell-Sloman Collection at Brock University: A Fugitive Archive

Dr. Julie Crooks is our second Walker Cultural Leader in Visual Arts for 2017-18. Her public lecture will draw on current research that examines the ways in which black communities, by the mid to late 19th century, in settlements throughout Southern Ontario, used photography as a critical and powerful tool for self-representation. Crooks’ research situates the Bell-Sloman Collection as a “fugitive archive,” built with defiance and resistance, in order to preserve, salvage and recover the histories of black communities whose stories and material artefacts are often left untold or subject to erasure. The exhibition at the VISA Gallery and Exhibition Space (above) will showcase some of the material presented in the lecture.

Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Time: 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Preceded by a reception for the exhibition at the VISA Gallery and Exhibition Space.
Location: Marilyn I. Walker Theatre, Brock University (second floor, above the VISA Gallery)
This is a free community event, but tickets are required and are available at wcl-bell-sloman-crooks.eventbrite.com

The Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University and the Walker Cultural Leader Series presents:

The Second Drama in Education and Applied Theatre Symposium.

January 26 and 27, 2018

Our world as we know it is rapidly changing, with scholars identifying present events as ‘post-normal’ (O’Connor and Anderson 2015). In this climate of anxiety and political uncertainty, how is the practice of drama in education and applied theatre a means to respond to and attempt to speak back to these times? The lectures and workshops will offer key insights into how our scholars use this practice to grapple with these issues.

Marilyn I. Walker Theatre at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts

All of us today, as scholars, artists and citizens, are challenged with listening to and telling forward the story of this home we call Canada. As we consider this task, where are the possibilities for change, for hope, and for honest listening – listening not to consume and extract (what scholar Dylan Robinson calls hungry listening) but to acknowledge and attend? I will talk about ways to think and feel about what it means to witness and respond to calls for justice as whole people who draw upon a rich variety of resources. How do all of us, individually and collectively, honour our own heritage, traditions and teachers? How do we bring these to the table and to how we live, work and attend? What do each of us offer to the conversation? This is about what it means to be “on the ground”, to negotiate the challenge to witness with the alarm and feeling of consequence that entails a meeting with a traumatized environment. I will draw on Karen Barad’s performative metaphysics, Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble” and E.V.Walter’s discussion of “places of experience” to re-imagine my ideas of foolish witness.

Marilyn I. Walker Theatre at the Marilyn I. Walker School of Fine and Performing Arts

In this keynote, I will use a case study of one research site in Lucknow, India, in my current multi-sited, applied theatre research, Youth, Theatre, Radical Hope and the Ethical Imaginary: an intercultural investigation of drama pedagogy, performance and civic engagement (2014-2019) to consider how drama can ‘speak back to these times’ if we deem- as some social innovation theorists do- the social world as made and imagined. How have the students in India, and how might we in our various pedagogical and creating contexts, use theatre to understand social systems and imagine a progressive sociality? In India, using drama, performance and critical dialogues, the work is both deeply political and radically hopeful through the ways in which it reorients, redefines and revisions the social world. Their classroom practice follows from a 19th century feminist theatre history, I will argue, that enables a transformative ambition, just what is needed in these harrowing global times. As democracies thin under populist and neoliberal regimes across most nation states, the young people and their teachers in India have long understood the power of collective opposition as a social practice and political resistance, but they have also seized upon drama and performance as the most powerful means to this end. Social innovation scholars have suggested that by harnessing what they are calling “collective intelligence”, it may be possible to dramatically improve societies’ ability to tackle seemingly intractable social problems. The students at Prerna school in India have positioned theatre as a “language of care” and a central tool for understanding the political economy and deconstructing the forces of oppression. It is time for all of us to harness the unimaginable, in our classrooms, on our stages, and in the street.

In Transit: Artistic Interventions in Precarious Times is a one-person performance piece, combining multimedia, live theatrical performance, and audience engagement to create an evocative and thought provoking dramatic experience. This autoethnographic theatrical piece explores the intersections of queer identities, Christianity’s contributions to anti-queer violence, and the challenges of embodying transgender identities within our current political contexts. Mesner weaves a narrative arc between current live theatrical performances from his 2017 piece, In Transit and multimedia excerpts from the filmic version of his 2014 play, Intervention, that was part of his doctoral dissertation.

This performance will be of interest to scholars, graduate students, practitioners, and activists working in such areas as arts-based educational research, performance studies, transgender and queer studies, religion/theology, and anti-oppressive education.

This is a free community event. Admission is on a first-come first-serve basis. Estimated capacity is 200.

The Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University and the Walker Cultural Leader Series presents:

Tensions of Engagement in the Canadian Immigrant Theatre Context

featuring Lina de Guevara, founder of Puente Theatre (Victoria) and Ruth Howard of Jumblies Theatre (Toronto), with Dr. Yasmine Kandil of Brock University (Niagara)
March 16 and 17, 2018

A panel conversation and workshops on the theme of Tensions of Engagement in the Canadian Immigrant Theatre Context. This event will look at how theatre has been used to create collaborative opportunities with immigrants and refugees in Canada, and what struggles lay ahead of us to bridge the divide between settler Canadians and newcomers.
Invited speakers include Ruth Howard of Jumblies Theatre (Toronto), and Lina de Guevara, founder of Puente Theatre (Victoria).
The event is scheduled to take place on March 16-17, 2018.
Registration required for workshops only. tensions-of-engagement-workshops.eventbrite.com